Jared said on September 11, 2008 (permalink)

I certainly don’t care what any graph or review pundit says. There is no doubt in my mind that Chrome is faster for certain types of pages, and *absolutely* faster to start (although that might be due to add-ons & other non-native detritus).

I use FedEx.com a lot for my business, and it’s simply no comparison. Chrome is so much faster that going back to FF seems like someone just dialed back the clock on my processor.

All of that being said, there are still many things I prefer FF for, and will probably end up using all three browsers until someone gets it 100% right. It kills me that there are still sites that require IE, but that’s what I have to put up with. Luckily, it seems to be fewer and fewer these days.

Mitch, as @Leo says, this isn’t a rage against you, it’s simply my user experience over the last week or so. Graphs mean little when the proof is so clearly in my pudding. :-)

Alec said on September 24, 2008 (permalink)

@Leo: Actually, I can tell a huge difference in webpage rendering speeds. But hey, doesn’t sound like these issues concern you. I suggest you stick to Internet Explorer; that browser was designed for an attitude such as yours.

Alec said on September 24, 2008 (permalink)

@Leo: I did read your entire comment. I’m here to disagree: I don’t believe that the ‘benchmarks are crap’, as you put it. I think it’s awfully dismissive to the engineering that goes into increasing rendering speeds.

I don’t think that those benchmarks are useful to the average user by any means, for that same reason that over 40% of the browser market share still uses IE6 or below (god save us).

The problem is that too many people look at these things in terms of “what’s right for the consumer”. In that sense, yes the benchmarks only offer obscure and irrelevant information. But for those who like to develop webapps, it’s interesting to see what direction the browsers are going in and to encourage this race to continue.

Stephan Sokolow said on October 2, 2008 (permalink)

I’m much more looking forward to seeing a KPart and a WebKit release that’ll let me use WebKit and a 64-bit capable version of SquirrelFish Extreme with Konqueror 4.x.

For those who don’t already know, Konqueror is KDE’s browser and it currently uses KHTML from which WebKit was forked. SquirrelFish Extreme is WebKit’s new native-JIT javascript engine… but they haven’t implemented the x86_64 version of the JIT yet.

As it is, Konqueror is very nice but it has three little shortcomings:
1. Web developers usually test against Trident (Intenet Explorer), Presto (Opera), Gecko, and WebKit but not KHTML, so it’s a game of catch-up to stay fully compatible with things like Google Reader.
2. KJS is noticeably slower than the other JS engines.
3. The extension API for Konqueror 3.x is a poorly-documented C++ interface while 4.x should soon support a generic API called Kross for extending apps using the language of your choice. (Python, in my case)